Political Scene: Inequality and Education in Newark

In the magazine this week, Dale Russakoff writes about the education-reform efforts in Newark, New Jersey. She joins Jelani Cobb and host Dorothy Wickenden on the Political Scene podcast to discuss the pitfalls of the education-reform movement in the context of inequality, public schools, and segregation, sixty years after the Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.

Following a hundred-million-dollar donation by Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, teams of consultants began attempting to reform Newark’s public schools. But, Russakoff says, they “really haven’t spent much time at all in public schools in the communities. They’re really about management reforms, from the top down, that they believe will make a huge difference in the delivery of education to children. But it does leave out the most important story in education, which is what’s going on with the kids and the families in the neighborhoods.” A big part of what’s lost by not involving communities in reforming their schools is an understanding of the contours of poverty and racism in America.

“One of the things that gets left out of the conversation around Brown is that there was a great deal of consternation among African-Americans about the end of segregation,” Cobb says. “The push for integration was really a last-ditch effort to fight against resource inequality. And so the idea, the underlying logic of integration, was if we put black children in the classroom next to white children, then they have to equalize resources.”

Russakoff also wrote about the Newark mayoral election that took place on Tuesday. You can see photographs of Newark students by Krisanne Johnson here.

You can listen to the episode above, or subscribe to the podcast on iTunes or via RSS, and become a fan of the Political Scene on Facebook.